BubbleScope And BubblePix Hands On

Panoramic photography has always had its difficulties. There's always the strong likelihood that you may go too fast or too slow in one of the shot frames, leaving for an unwanted deformation of the picture. Then there's the sight of a person spinning in one spot, looking like a fool and visually demonstrating just what you look like doing the same.

This nifty little invention has been around for quite a while, attracting audiences and tech blogs alike in July of last year, then going on to receive a full sum of required money (and more) from Crowdfunder. It's a device that connects to your smartphone camera (via a proprietary case) and takes photographs with 360 degrees of horizontal view, by 120 degrees vertical. The pop-up curved mirror expands the view of the smartphone's lense to capture the image.

Images and video are saved locally by default, with the user choosing whether to share the content or not (a welcome implementation). This is all done via the Bubblepix application, which will have its own community based around the app (a la Instagram) and the results (or 'Bubbles' as they are called) are easily shared to other networks either via a jpeg or an embedded flash player, so it's interactive within a Facebook or Twitter window.

The image quality is of a nice high resolution; but as the scope essentially stretches the resolution of the camera lense beyond its normal viewfinder parameters to a full 360 degree view, finite quality is going to be sacrificed. Although, for the purpose of just taking quick snaps, no-one's really going to care in the face of the friendly UI of the app and the sense of a quirky charm from using the bubblescope.

However, take the content you've captured out the context of the application and things start to get interesting. You have an option to save any uploaded bubbles straight to your phone's gallery; with video this becomes the meeting point of fisheye filming and panoramic photography. It creates a weird result: a strange perspective that, while inhibited by the stalk that the mirror is connected to, gives a slight artistic flair to what we feel is an understated feature of the experience.

The Bubblescope and subsequent Bubblepix app make for a great panoramic shooting solution, relying on the analogue means of mirrors over digital stitching and post processing of images. It's a novel idea that, with the right community engagement that a photography app needs has the potential to be extremely successful. Best of luck to them!

The app is available for free to download, and with hardware production starting in the next couple of weeks, you can expect the bubblescope to go on sale soon at roundabout the £60 mark.

Jason England

Jason England

I am the Founder and Editor-in-chief of New Rising Media. You can follow me on Twitter @MrJasonEngland.

Soladapt's Touchscreen Overlay presents the unique and cost effective opportunity to experience the full functionality of touch-based UIs like Windows 8. Simply put, it's a pane of toughened glass you put over the front of your display and plug in via USB, giving you Touchscreen capabilities.

Microsoft Surface RT Hands On At Gadget Show Live Christmas

Arriving just over a month from the launch of its new operating system, Microsoft’s impression on the Gadget Show Live Christmas floor was a quite considerable one. Dominating a hefty chunk of the floor space at the show (as well as its entrance), it was difficult to miss anything the computing giant had to offer; from the array of devices running its new OS, to the promotion of its first-ever tablet PC: Microsoft Surface.

Google Nexus 4 Hands On At Gadget Show Live Christmas

A successor to the company’s previous flagship handset – the Galaxy Nexus – the Nexus 4, inspired in design by Google but built by LG, it’s one of the most fully-featured smartphones currently at market – that is, if you can manage to secure stock from the Google Play Store – but also one of the most affordable, coming in at £239 for the 8GB and £279 for the 16GB. Without question, this is one Nexus worth getting excited about.

Damson Twist Bluetooth Speaker Hands On At Gadget Show Live Christmas

We've seen many speakers that utilise the concept of resonating through a surface to emit sound over this last year. So much so, that we fear it may become nothing more than a party trick: the one 'sexy' moment of a gadget, which seen and used once when received as a gift. The one fear, after seeing this influx, is this technology going the way of the 'iPod' into 'Christmas stocking-filler' territory. As it's quite an innovative space.

WOWee One Product Range Hands-On

Where pushing the boundaries in sound quality often comes at the cost of increasing size and reduced portability, and where reigning in the bulk of the product design allows the quality of the sound to suffer, portable speakers in their very nature are, quite frankly, more often than not atrocious excuses for speaker systems. With little to no low bass range to sort our Mcfly-friendly tunes from our dubstep, dance and drum and bass while on the go, the inherent design issues associated with portable speakers has seemingly not escaped the team at WOWee One.